Probably not. The Sheriff claims that the vehicle will “save lives” and reasons that when “something like this rolls up, it’s time to give up.” I’m all for the police being appropriately armed, but give me a break. First of all, this thing is not going to have time to “roll up” unless the police are either conducting a pre-planned raid, or having a long standoff. And in either case, I very much doubt that an APC is going to intimidate criminals any more than twelve guys in riot gear and machine guns already can. .50cal machine guns are for closed firing ranges and war zones: places where you either want to have safe, human-target-free gun fun, or else turn real human beings into hamburger. They don’t belong in residential or urban police operations for anything short of Die Hard.
But wait: what if I told you that it all made sense because… because… Jesus!
Sheriff Lott stated that the name selected from the entries will be “The Peacemaker” because that is the APC’s purpose and the bible refers to law enforcement in Matthew 5:9 “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God”.
In all my reading of the beatitudes, I never once imagined Christ astride an Armored Personnel Carrier complete with a turret-mounted .50-caliber belt-fed machine gun, surrounded by apostles in SWAT gear, as he said to the crowd “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”
This too-perfect to be anything but suspicious piece of evidence comes in the form of a birth announcement in a Hawaii paper that just so happens to announce Barack Obama’s birth as occurring on the very same day that he was allegedly born.
And yet, the proud PUMAs still aren’t quite convinced: they have a twelve point list of suspected shiftiness, and a spirited comment thread full of theories and fantasies about this astonishingly irrelevant issue.
Then comes the loopiest sentence of all:
Jackson, I’m not sure that any info on the COLB is fake, but perhaps the document was set up to appear to be fake, so that we would spend hundreds of hours studying it…
Did you get that? Premier PUMA TexasDarlin is actually suggesting that there might have been a vast conspiracy to alter or misrepresent authentic documents such that they appear to be fake, all to throw her off the trail of… something. Something embarrassing about Obama’s mother.
You’d think with all the heated rhetoric about how Hillary’s campaign was was sabotaged by sexism, these people could find something better to do than spending their days trying to dig up dirt on the private relationships of a young woman living in the roaringly sexist 60s.
Patrick Ruffini slams the Obama campaign for using a foreign language in its promotional material for an event in Germany. Apparently it’s now unpatriotic to so much as concede that they speak foreign languages in foreign countries. Or maybe American politicians should only be allowed to speak in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the UK.
Get it? Ultra-partisan Ruffini is so knee-jerkily nuts that he actually thinks that using a foreign language in a foreign country is unamerican!
Unfortunately, Yglesias’ take is, literally, too funny to be true.
Ruffini’s actual objection is the use of classic campaign tactics and money to build a crowd for the speech in a foreign land. The fact that the flyers are in German is not a problem for him because he thinks that Americans should never stoop to the use of anything but the King’s English. It’s a problem for him because it demonstrates how Obama’s campaign is willing to spend money lobbying foreigners to rally for American-media consumption:
So, this isn’t just some sober, high-minded foreign policy speech, part of a foreign trip occurring under the auspices of his official Senate office. It is a campaign rally occurring on foreign soil. They are using the same tactics to turn out Germans to an event as they would to any rally right here in America.
…
The sea of Germans drummed up by the Obama campaign will be used as props to tell us Americans how to vote, and the campaign isn’t trying to pretend otherwise. That’s breathtakingly arrogant, and par for the course for Barack Obama.
Now, I don’t think it’s breathtakingly arrogant at all: this is simply Ruffini being a good campaign man and dutifully reinforcing the standard Republican talking point about Obama having a big head.
I disagree with Ruffini’s argument, of course: demonstrating Obama’s appeal to the world is undeniably a legitimate selling point for his candidacy. It’s all a demonstration of his ability to get things done abroad to better serve American interests back home. He has as much reason to play that up as McCain does to talk about the surge (or to campaign abroad himself).
Still, Yglesias’ criticism of Ruffini is the only thing that’s “breathtakingly” anything here: breathtakingly sloppy. A little skepticism about something seemingly too partisan-ly perfect would have served him a little better.
And finally, Orac over at Respectful Insolence bemoans yet another loss to the forces of woo: apparently some states, with Vermont the most prominant amongst them, are starting to require insurance companies to pay for the “evidence-free medicine” of naturopathy. Lest you think that such errant nonsense couldn’t possibly hurt you, Orac points out that it’s a move that will kick you right in the pocketbook:
I don’t know about you, but if I were paying into an insurance plan, and the company administering that plan were wasting money paying for woo, I’d be mightily pissed. This can only serve to drive up the costs for everyone, as patients with non-self-limiting diseases pursue non-science-based modalities, think they feel better for a while, and then find that their disease is progressing, at which point they seek out science-based medical care–which their insurance companies will have to pay for, too.
I’m a staunch anti-torture guy. The recent revelation that our government decided to literally copy the very same torture techniques used on our own soldiers in the Korean War (from a document discussing how the techniques were used to elicit false confessions, no less) is vile and embarrassing.
But I have to admit, despite what an incredibly pompous jerk Freddy Gray is while pointing it out, and as much as I disagree with his ultimate purpose of belittling the issue of torture, there is something sort of amusing and surreal about the fact that the number of journalists who have subjected themselves to waterboarding is probably now higher than the number of terrorists the U.S. used the actually technique on.
Still, forming a satirical group called “Stop Journalists From Waterboarding Themselves” is a bit much.
Usually, some form of trying to excavate any kind of negative thing cycling in the mind and turn it toward the positive. For example, when I am annoyed with Dick Cheney, I meditate on how Dick Cheney was my mother in a previous life and nursed me at his breast.
Only by resorting to Family Guy can I fully capture the horror of this image:
The American Family Association has a policy at its new outlet, OneNewsNow, never to use the word “gay” but to replace it with “homosexual.” And that works absolutely perfectly until they write an article about an athlete whose last name is Gay, as in Tyson Gay, the fastest man on the US Olympic track team.
Highly “homosexual” hilarity ensues, with much pumping, palm slapping, and lunging. OneNewsNow has since caught and fixed the mistake, but Brayton and his readers have preserved the original for posterity. Don’t miss it.
Given that the company’s policy is almost certainly based on the belief that the word “homosexual” sounds more sexualized and clinical than “gay,” this is a “boner” that couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of bigots. It doesn’t really help that the story also features a guy named Dix.
“It means a lot to me,” the 25-year-old Homosexual said. “I’m glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me.”
…
After the race, Homosexual and Dix looked at each other and slapped palms, then hugged.
…
Drummond noticed Homosexual was bringing his feet too high behind his back with each stride, and they worked to correct that. Clearly, it’s paying off.
…
“I’m sore right now,” Homosexual said, “but probably from the victory lap.”
Memphis Grizzlies backers hit the hay hoping that Kevin Love would open things up for Rudy Homosexual in the frontcourt.
The whole thing reminds me of the imaginary varsity sport Seanbaby once suggested might get invented if conservatives were ever successful in banning all mention of homosexuality from the culture.
From the “What, Seriously?!” file comes this incredible story of Congressional hubris: ten Republican Senators are co-sponsoring the usual federal “marriage protection” balderdash. That, and the complete lack of explanation of how banning some marriages would in any way help preserve or enhance other marriages, is nothing surprising.
Seriously, what’s up with this? According to a new Pew study on religion, 21% of atheists believe in God: either a personal or impersonal force. And 8% are absolutely certain that a God exists. 12% even believe in heaven, and 10% in hell!
Either we have here a very lousy study, a heck of a lot of joke answers, or a fair number of people who are remarkably confused about what “atheist” means. I very much doubt that the bulk of these contradictory responses represent the sort of sophisticatedly confusing theologies of people like Paul Tillich.
Steven Landsburg has to be one of my favorite authors: contrarian in all the right ways, ruggedly skeptical, utterly unafraid to buck conventional wisdom. There’s never guarantee that you’ll agree with what he argues (at least at first), but you will be entertained, engaged, and forced think of issues from entirely new angles.
His most recent book (sadly not that recent) was More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics, in which he argued (among many other things) that there were social situations in which increased promiscuity amongst the sexually prude could actually reduce the transmission of disease. Indeed, he argued that prudishness was, in some cases, as much a socially harmful vice as sleeping around.
His argument was essentially theoretical, but it wasn’t entirely out of the blue: it was based on research by another economist, Michael Kremer and some pretty solid models of sexual behavior and disease transmission.
And now, it seems like it’s no longer even just hypothetical.
That’s because, according to Marginal Revolution blogger Alex Tabarrok, the recent history of Thailand provides a real world example of more total sex leading to a reduction in disease transmission. A drastic, culturally driven increase in normally chaste women engaging in premarital sex coupled with a (not causally unconnected) drop in the number of men going to prostitutes cratered the rates of HIV transmission: even in sex workers.
And to top it all off, the place where Alex Tabarrok discovered this little gem? Elizabeth Pisani’s new book called “The Wisdom of Whores.” It’s all enough to make social conservatives scream.
Of course, in all seriousness, those conservatives have plenty of worthwhile concerns. And just as a disclaimer before you run out and lose your virginity in the service of public safety: the particular effect here relies on a particular sort of sexual situation that may or may not have any relevance to your society. And in any case, it still unavoidably involves the former prudes taking on more risk to their own health in order improve the lives of others. So, please, read the books instead of rushing out to do anything foolish and frisky just on my word.
In case you haven’t heard, comedian and Politically Incorrect/Real Time host Bill Maher has a new film headed to theaters: a com-ockumentary of sorts called Religulous, in which he sets out to explore, and generally ridicule, the silliness of religious practice and belief.
Now, it’d be rather silly for me to complain about someone criticizing religious beliefs. Or even poking a bit of admittedly underhanded fun at all things theological. But I still can’t in good conscience look at this film with anything other than apprehension…
Posted by Bad 
From the “What, Seriously?!” file comes this incredible story of Congressional hubris: ten Republican Senators are co-sponsoring the usual federal “marriage protection” balderdash. That, and the complete lack of explanation of how banning some marriages would in any way help preserve or enhance other marriages, is nothing surprising. 
Ov vey…
The Bad Idea Blog 